Little Explorer's Class
Welcome to the Little Explorer's home page! Here you can view a weekly summary of what our Little Explorers did in class!
The Little Explorer's units will be focused around a monthly theme with focuses on their sense of self, kindness and friendship, independence, and an understanding of the fundamentals they will need in Junior Kindergarten.
Our Little Explorer's follow the same letters and colors of the month as Jr. K as well as our central school theme (See Academic Calendar)
Art projects are a wonderful and fun way for the children in this class to take the first steps that they need to attain the skills required to move up to Junior K. and eventually kindergarten.
We focus on the children familiarizing themselves with the materials used in art projects and how to correctly utilize them, for example learning to hold a paintbrush and paint within an outline is a stepping stone to eventually holding a pencil and writing, removing and placing stickers helps the children practice crucial fine motor skills, and so on.
October's theme: Halloween and Fire Safety
In October our Little Explorer's will be learning about Fire Safety during our combined morning circle time. We will be teaching the school about what firefighters do, what the firefighters look like in their gear, how to be safe in the event of a fire, and other safety lessons such as why we don't ever play with things like matches, lighters, etc. The children will also learn about the benefits of fire and how it can be utilized safely, like helping our parents cook in the kitchen!
The school is also buzzing with excitement for Halloween! Our circle time songs will be more Halloween themed this much, such as our "Days of the Week" song being set to the tune of "The Addams Family". Books like "Scaredy-Cat Splat", "Hedgehugs, Autumn Hide and Squeak", "Five Little Pumpkins", "Nighty Night, Little Green Monster", and many more!
Our letters of the month will be "D, E, F, G". Our colors of the month are Orange and Black. Our art projects with the children will reflect that, getting the young ones familiar with the look of the letters and different words that they already know which start with the letter we are working on that week. Our art projects help the children practice the gross and fine motor skills that they will need when they move up to Junior K.
Week of October 3rd - 7th
Letter of the Week: Dd
This week we shifted focus to decorating the classroom with fun art projects for fall and Halloween!
The Little Explorer's got hands on and messy with some paint, we painted some pumpkin cutouts using pinecones as our tool! For this Process Art project, the purpose was not the end goal but the journey! The children using pinecones to paint is a wonderful sensory activity that stimulates the feelings in their hands as they hold, roll, and stamp the pinecone around on their paper.
To help decorate the classroom as well as practice gross motor skills, the Little Explorer's used Do-a-Dot Art Markers to stamp fun fall colors into autumn leaf cutouts. This also served as gentle practice on staying inside the lines of a picture during coloring.
We got even more messy decorating our LGAP meadow sunflowers! The Little Explorer's joined Junior K. in practicing fine motor skills by using paint brushes to apply glue to their sunflower petal cut outs. Then they had loads of fun dumping fall colored glitter onto their glue!
The children had a relaxing day with orange water color, painting over four different jack-o-lantern pumpkins that conveyed different emotions on each; Happy, Sad, Silly, and Mad.
Finally we got even more fine motor skill practice in decorating our fall wreaths! The children applied glue to their wreath templates with paint brushes, and then took their time to carefully choose and apply autumn leaves all around their wreath.
Week of October 10th-14th
Letter of the Week: Ee
On Monday we had the Little's work with some more glue, this time gluing popsicle sticks onto a letter E. This activity helped with fine motor skills as well as letter recognition and is the beginning of learning to write the letter "E". The kids had a double project today, and followed up their popsicle stick project by gluing Eight Eggs into a nest! We had the children count out their eggs before gluing them into the nest.
On Tuesday we threw some Halloween flair into our weekly projects by making silly Letter E monsters. The kids practiced applying glue to their letter E's(tracing the E with their paintbrush in doing so) and applying brightly colored pom-poms to make their monsters.
Mid-way through the week we got hands on and messy with shaving cream painting! The Little Explorer's swirled blue and green paint around in shaving cream to paint paper plate "Earth"'s.
Thursday the kiddo's were busy making Elephant plants. We got in some good painting and gluing practice with the Little Explorer's, and this activity also helps with facial-feature placement recognition.
Our little ones took Friday off after a week of hard work to spend the day playing hard with their friends!
